Convergence
by duathkaimelar
Summary: "It's always been just you and her."  Booth/Brennan, set in early season six.


**Convergence**

**Summary:** It's always been just you and her. (Booth/Brennan, set in season six).

You told her once to take her brain and shift it into neutral, then take her heart and shift it into overdrive.

If you ever doubted how much she actually valued your advice, that single moment would be enough to remind you just how much she _did_ value and trust you.

That single moment shone out brighter than the north star, speaking volumes of just how much heart she possesses - metaphorically, of course - and you would never again believe her when she claimed she wasn't capable of deep emotion.

Sometimes you believe she has too much heart, and is too adept at bottling it up.

_(Parker is laughing with Max Keenan; he is gazing at him with admiration and genuine interest and Max laughs at the innocence of a child. You watch the diet coke bottle shake and burst with pressure after the simple, seemingly harmless drop of one, two, three, four mentos mints; you watch the stream of soda and wonder if one day, the bottle will be Bones and the mentos little pieces of her soul that she's carefully guarded away.)_

Everything happens eventually.

Everyone breaks.

You swear to yourself in that moment you wouldn't let that happen to her - small bursts of pressure every now and then are much, much better, and you don't mind if she bursts all over you.

Ahem. Metaphorically.

The problem is that you are just a little too good at bottling up emotion yourself; a little too skilled at pretending you are grateful for the increasing amount of time you spend with Parker when you still distinctly feel the pain of the little moments you miss; a little too skilled at pretending you don't think about why you proposed to Rebecca anymore; a little too skilled at pretending that Brennan really is just your partner.

_(One of the first times you suspect you might be in love with her is when she is singing. She is so radiant, so deceptively carefree when she sings. You remember the first time, letting go in her apartment, and you feel as hot blooded as the song. The second time, she is moving to the music on stage and the whole world has fallen away)._

Maybe if you keep telling everyone that, you'll start to believe it.

There comes a time when too many pieces of your own soul have been carefully guarded away, and your own emotions are ripping you apart. You don't burst as violently as the soda bottle. You burst in a gentler way, but filled with passion. All you've wanted for so many months is her, and you allow yourself to propose the idea.

_(Rebecca spooks when you ask her to marry you. There is a split second when you see the happiness in her eyes, a split second when you think she may say yes, and then her eyes cloud over and her brain takes over; she protests, she says she can't, she gets angry. She pushes you away._

_A few days after that fateful night at the Hoover, sitting alone in a bar with a bottle of vodka (never tequila without her), it occurs to you that Bones spooked in the exact same way. You laugh hollowly at your pattern and you think of words she uttered to you once:_

_"The very definition of insanity is repeating the same thing over and over and expecting a different outcome.")_

Even the air tastes bitter on your tongue after her rejection that night.

You take a page from her book, for once, after too many years of trying to get her to live just a little more freely, and you bottle your feelings up and send them out to sea - compartmentalize in a true Dr. Temperance Brennan style. Vaguely you smile and think she would be proud of you, but any thoughts of her smile hurt just a little too much, so you free the country when she does and forget, just live.

Except you aren't really living and if you really let yourself think, you'd know that.

It's easier to lose yourself in the careless, adventurous, gloriously intoxicating, beautiful blonde journalist who's looking for a good time, who openly admires your toned abdomen and gives you little kisses just because.

She's beautiful and affectionate; she eventually tells you she loves you. She's perfect, and when she follows you across the world, you can't imagine anything taking this happiness away.

Imagining was your first mistake. When you look for problems, you tend to find them, and in this case, it is the return to your family and the home you have made for yourself - a home you insisted on with a hodgepodge team of scientists - that helps you see how hollow your relationship is.

Your relationship with Hannah is easy. She is perfect – too perfect. You have never believed that anything worthy in life came easy, and a woman's imperfections have always been more beautiful to you.

It is the first time you've doubted your relationship with Hannah and it shakes you to your core - one small crack and the rest of your facade split like the ground after an earthquake and the aftershocks leave you at the bar - the same bar you came to for a straight week after she turned you down almost a year ago - with a bottle of vodka and a depression like a storm cloud.

In your intoxicated state, you lose the control over your mind you have so carefully put into place and you find yourself repeating that night over and over in your head. You still know her, you still know her too well. You'd be able to place what went wrong.

You didn't fight. You had always been a fighter, but you gave up this time - you burst and when the soda had stopped flowing, when the only thing left to do was clean up the mess, she'd refused you and you'd burst again and shut out her words, shut out what she was trying to tell you without saying it.

Of course she cared about you. She was rejecting the situation, not you - too much heart. Too much heart, and it scared her, and her brain went into overdrive - way into overdrive.

So had yours; that was your fundamental mistake. Bones had enough brain for a whole country, and you'd always met her at the boxing ring with just as much heart.

No matter what Sweets said about you and your partner, you had always known this was why you worked so well together.

You had always believed that opposites attracted.

In your desperation to live your life happily, in your desperation to stop your dreams still full of what-ifs, you forget that everyone breaks eventually and you have reached your breaking point - multiple times, perhaps - but she has not, and if you were as close to her as you were before, you'd be recognizing the signs, the bubbling just beneath the surface.

They slip past your radar and months later it will occur to you that this, too, added to her breaking. She hates cliches but she will tell you later that she thinks she understands not knowing exactly what you have until it's gone.

Your absence in her life leaves her empty and she thinks she resents you for it. She doesn't, really, but she hasn't put her heart into overdrive in a long, long time, and so she pretends she resents you for making her believe in something else ephemeral.

It is almost pathetic how easily you break. You may have chosen to ignore the smallest signs, such as her comments about not seeing anyone in the Islands, or calling love an idiot to your face, but the sight of her curled against the wall in her office, silent tears sliding down her cheeks, is enough to weaken your resolve.

She whispers her stream of thought to you – incoherently, and it scares you to the bone because it's her – and when she mumbles of expectations and compartmentalizing and emotions and says _I don't think I want my life to be what I expected_ – your heart clenches in your chest and for the first time in a long while, you allow yourself to feel for her again. You take her into your arms and kiss the top of her head. The simultaneous familiarity and overwhelming melancholy of your actions are enough to break your heart.

You were an idiot to ever lie to yourself (and her) and believe you could get over her.

_(You can count on one hand the number of your girlfriends that had been introduced to Parker. Parker liked the few he had met, but he had loved the one who was never your girlfriend. He adored his Dr. Bones. Sometimes, this hurt you the most.)_

You have been telling her for years that true love never dies. You are more sure of the truth of this now than you ever have been, but you are acutely aware that in her eyes, you have proved it is a lie.

You have lost a lot of your privileges with her, as she has with you, but you are still her partner, and it is still your job to watch out for her, so you squeeze her tightly and promise her that she will never be alone, because she has always had you. You tell her she can shape the rest of her life any way she wants, and that she should put her heart into overdrive to do so. She smiles at the memory.

She whispers to you that she fears putting her heart into overdrive will only complicate matters beyond the scope of sensibility, and you laugh and tell her the heart isn't supposed to be sensible. She seems distressed that you are pushing the issue.

Thinking of different outcomes and cold nights, you begin to back away as you release her from your grip, but you find your distance sickening, so instead, you kneel down next to her again and lift her chin in your fingers to force her to look at you.

The familiar action seems to set her free and her tears become stronger, more audible. You see how terrified she is, how pained she has been, and the truth of your emotions and your world comes crashing into you with more force than a comet striking the Earth.

(_You remember a time when you told her two people could break the laws of physics together. The possibility used to keep you warm at night.)_

You used to imagine all the ways you could tell her you loved her - all the evidence you could provide, the promises that they would still be them, just with law-breaking sex and the chance to treat your "guy hugs" the way you always meant them.

You are angry at yourself, not for the first time, about forgetting all your possibilities when the opportunity actually came.

The time for contemplation is not when your partner is crying in her office, and you envelope her in your arms, stroking her back but not saying a word. She still feels right in your arms, and you find yourself shivering. You're nervous, your body tenses, but you will stand your ground. You've felt what it's like to _actually_ be "just" partners, and you're pretty sure neither of you like it very much.

_(You stand with her at the dock, watching Sully sail away in the boat he named after her and she turns to you, eyes heavy and speaking of her pain, pleading with you to bring her out of her thoughts. You swear to yourself then that you won't ever leave her like that - just abandon her because she's too scared to change.)_

You feel sick. You weren't any better than anyone else in her life.

You're lucky she's still letting you hold her. The fact that she is obviously speaks volumes.

In a whisper, you tell her you're still here to catch her when she falls, and she replies that she isn't physically falling and as such, you cannot catch her, but she understands the sentiment, and you chuckle at her squinty response.

You know. You're still that guy.

_(I don't know how to change, she says, but she knows all too well.)_

The center must hold. You've reassured each other multiple times, after multiple mistakes, of this. It is the one truth that has always held, throughout all the other challenges in your life, and you agree with her on one thing - the center has always held, and this is the most crucial piece of evidence of all. Even the universe knew something about you when neither of you were sure.

You've always wanted to be someone's knight in shining armor and Hannah is fantastic but she doesn't need you.

_(She grabs you by your shirt and pulls you down under a piece of mistletoe. She kisses you. She uses her tongue and the taste of coffee and mint are fresh on her breath. Your whole body tingles with her scent and her presence and you take two cold showers later but you swear you taste her for days.)_

She whispers that she was wrong and it is so quiet you aren't even sure she had spoken. You tilt your head and squeeze her. She seems reassured and repeats that she was wrong. She rants about evidence and friendship and years of built trust and her failure to recognize her own patterns but you aren't really listening until she admits that although she did believe it was okay to see someone on occasion to satisfy her urges, perhaps she had been using that excuse a little too often with you in the last year or so of your partnership - before the break. And certainly after.

She whispers your suspicion; she rejected the scenario, but not you. She didn't want to take a chance on you and her because you are more to each other than just a chance. It had always been bigger than that.

She sobs when she grieves, feels the regret of causing so much pain to you both by her rejection – the very outcome she was trying to avoid.

(_You tell her there is someone out there for everyone, if they are open enough to see it. You hadn't been open enough to see her for so long. When you finally were, she was not. You should have told her the caveat – both parties need to be open enough.)_

More what-ifs fill your brain, and you wonder. If two people can break the laws of physics, can two people overcome a hurdle of obstacles larger and more convoluted than Mount Everest?

She whispers that, just sometimes, she wishes she could be irrational.

It's enough to convince you that you want to be there for her like you were, once.

You can be anything you want, you tell her. We can be anything we want. With a crease in her forehead she thinks this over for a few minutes, and asks you if that had been your point all along.

_(The regret in her eyes is so deep it burns and when she pleads with you not to look so sad, you are so angry with her for not understanding just how deeply you are in love with her. You are angry with her for not understanding that she is worth every bit of pain you feel.)_

She told you once that Rebecca had told her she believed there was one, single moment when two people could catch fire or burn out. You had convinced yourself that night outside the Hoover had been your moment, and you had burnt out.

You aren't sure if Rebecca was right, and you two simply hadn't missed your moment (you were a team, and the true moment would be when both of you were ready) or if she was horribly wrong and all those little moments between you two over the years meant something after all, but you were sure that you could defy the odds together.

Gamblers aren't quitters.

Instead of replying, you kiss her deeply. You always were just a little off your rocker. You experience one terrifying moment when she freezes and your heart sinks into your stomach and you're sure you won't be able to breathe again but it's over in the blink of an eye and she kisses you back, even deeper, with tongue but no gum this time, and she tastes just the same.

It is charged and full of regret for everything that's happened. When it's over, you don't regret kissing her, but you have no words for what has just happened and neither has she, so you weakly bite out that there was a different outcome this time and she deadpans that statistically, there are always outliers, but her eyes are shining and you know, for once, that she isn't entirely just trying to explain the occurrence.

_(Even through her winter gloves, her fingertips sear your skin and when she laughs, you are breathless.)_

She sees that you have no words - she's gotten better at reading you - and she tells you that she's putting her heart into overdrive, just like you told her. When you're ready. She tells you she may want to believe in the forever you promise, but she doesn't have the faith on her own. She needs you to remind her.

You know she needs you, but she doesn't admit it very often.

You kiss her again, because she has always been your deepest addiction, and you cup her face in your hands and it is like coming home. You know you should feel terrible for what you are doing to Hannah and you will, when the time comes to face reality, but your shoulders release tensions you've been ignoring for months and your heart feels just a little lighter.

When your lips leave hers, she is crying again, incoherently apologizing for running away and being afraid, warning you that she's no good at relationships and you mean too much to her and she's so scared she'll mess it up, so you pull her into your arms again and sit with her, just sit, for a long time, before you reassure her that you won't let her screw it up again if she promises not to let you screw it up, either.

_(Sweets tells you two that you complement each other even when you shouldn't and it is one of your proudest moments)._

She tells you, her voice raw, that she thinks she can handle this if they are a team in their relationship just as they have been a team in their lives for many years. She regrets not seeing that truth before. It took months in the desert and too much time to think.

You got there eventually, you tell her, and although you will need time to sort out the mess you've made, sort out your relationship with Hannah, you've got all the time in the world, now.

She tells you that's irrational, and you ask her to be irrational for just a while longer.

She got there eventually. You apologize for being so uncaring for months, for not being any better than anyone else in her life that's left her.

You're only human, she replies.

So are you, you remind her.

She tells you it is your fault. It is illogical, but she cannot stop comparing other men to you. She knows there is a difference between what she can do and what she wants to do, and she can live the rest of her life the way she's always known but she wants to break the laws of physics, and she won't risk it with anyone else but you.

_("That's a lot of heart, Bones," you whisper to her with anguish, from the wrong side of the courtroom.)_

_(Your brain tumor should have been one of the scariest moments of your life, but everything happened so quickly. What you remember the most is her holding your hand and gazing into your eyes with care before they wheeled you in for surgery, and you felt sure you would be alright as long as she was there, holding your hand.)_

She cannot promise forever but she knows she loves you, she knows you are a permanent fixture in her life.

That's all you ever wanted.

(_She is dating your boss, and going to work is rough, but she invites you to the museum that night.)_

Somehow, when the layers of life are stripped away, it is still just you and her at the center. It's always been just you and her.


End file.
